Statement 2010

Over the past two years the focus of my work has gradually shifted away from the period of the two World Wars and imagery related to remote sensing technologies and toward images that are a combination of memories of time spent in eastern Germany and stories from German Romantic literature. The German Romantic movement was in part a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and its weakening of human bonds to the natural world. In the stories of writers such as Hoffman, Von Kleist, Novalis, and Tieck, the psyches of the human characters aren't separate from the natural world in which the stories take place. Caves and castles appear and disappear as aspects of the protagonist's self; animals, plants, and the weather are affected by and respond to the protagonist's intent. They are also agents of forces above and beyond human understanding, part of a web of connections that dwarfs reason and intention.

Romanticism looked to the awe-inspiring in nature. From our current vantage point at the other end of the Industrial Revolution, which has made climate change an immediate danger, awe begins to be colored by fear. The castle images, which have come up repeatedly in this body of work, may refer at least in part to this unease. Poe's The Masque of the Red Death takes place in a castle in the Italian countryside, where a nobleman and his friends withdraw from the plague-ravaged countryside in the hopes of escaping a common and terrifying fate. The castle embodies the illusion of self-sufficiency and protection. There is nostalgia in this body of work for an unknown pre-industrial world, and a need to picture how the earth will now respond to us.

Statement 2007

The World Wars and the cosmos are recurring themes in my work.  In this show, they are joined by the beginnings of the “Plague Series,” imaginative renderings of scenes from the first wave of the Black Death in Europe in 1348.  This period was preceded and followed by years of unusual weather patterns.  Current concerns about climate change have led me to take a closer look at this historical episode in which the natural world seemed to turn on humanity, and the ways in which people responded.

These works explore the direct personal experience of conflict or stress as it occurs in moments of acute awareness, or moments when a decision to act is made. They reflect times when the landscape itself reflects extraordinary conditions that affect the ordinary texture of people’s lives.
 
Statement 2005

In this show, paintings of the cosmos are paired with paintings and drawings of earthly historical events – the two World Wars and the environments in which they took place.  Some of the paintings (such as “Ring”, “Trace,” and “Cloud cover, 3”) explore the differences and similarities between the capabilities of 21st century technologies developed during the wars and the traditional properties of divinity: seeing beyond the visible, keeping watch from the heavens, creating and destroying from a distance, and affecting the natural world in various ways.  They are also a simple homage to the extreme beauty of the universe that has been revealed through remote sensing technologies.

The charcoal drawings and some of the paintings are images either drawn from imagination or composed from hundreds of photographs of the period between 1917 and 1945.  Many of them make direct reference to the war while others depict areas untouched by the actual fighting but within its sphere of influence.  The act of making these drawings is essentially a meditation on the events depicted.  It is a way of participating, in some infinitesimal degree and at a great remove of time and distance, in the events I depict.
 
Statement on "Heimsuchung"

The images in my current paintings are mainly sky and landscapes, star fields, and other natural phenomena which appear alone or in combination with each other.  Frequently superimposed on these are the markings of cartography and remote sensing technologies such as radar, sonar, and LANDSAT.  I see remote sensing technologies as precise corollaries of mental processes: map-making, reconnaissance, detection, destruction, and deliverance, are as applicable to psychological and spiritual life as they are to global theaters of war.  Remote sensing technologies are, in some sense, twentieth century versions of the twelfth century concept of Heimsuchung.

The German term "Heimsuchung" has no precise equivalent in the English language.  Its original meaning of visitation by God, of God knowing exactly where one is at every moment of one's life, gradually gave way to its use as a term for the singling out of a person or people for visitation by disasters such a plague, famine and war; and yet the term still encompasses these two extremes of human experience everyday union with the divine, and the devastations and annihilations of the physical self and/or its environment.  Between these two poles is implied the image of an omniscient being, such as the God described by the Psalmist of the 139th Psalm: a being who discerns our thoughts from afar, in whose book "were written all the days that were formed for us, when none of them as yet existed, "and to whom "darkness is as light."  My work of the past decade consists of what might be called a series of visual mediations on these ideas.

I address a number of questions which have come out of my explorations of the wars and the theologies that stood in seeming opposition to them: what are the implications of death and destruction, particularly on a mass scale, for the lives of the survivors, and those who were untouched by violence?  How have the events and discoveries of the twentieth century changed our concept of divinity, and of personal relationship to the divine?  What are the mechanisms of faith?  How are we to understand the complex relationship between creation and destruction?  How are we separated from the past, and in what ways does it persist in the present?
The cartographic markings in my paintings, developed as tools of war, seem to me to speak to the need for specific and direct recognition of our existence and our vulnerability; for assurance of some kind that we are not abandoned to an arbitrary fate, even if this fate ultimately involved the destruction of our physical selves.  I am working toward an iconographic of faith that encompasses both our present-day awareness of the potential for destruction on an unprecedented scale, and the corresponding vastness of the divine.